Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen

Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen is the song that gives Fiete Honka a recurring image for loneliness and longing, but its returns do not promise comfort or reunion. First heard as his favorite song in a St. Pauli bar, it becomes part of an intimate scene in his filthy apartment with Gerda Voss, where Fiete plays it again and again while drinking. The song’s movement toward an absent beloved is set against a relationship in which Gerda’s freedom is steadily taken away.

The Song and Its First Appearance

On an uncertain Wednesday, Fiete is feeling wretched and alone. The evening’s prospects are unpredictable: sometimes the bars are lively, sometimes empty, and even Herbert cannot explain why. Against that uncertainty, the music box plays Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen, identified as Fiete’s favorite song. Its lyrics imagine a tear traveling to the speaker, carried by the wind and clouds, and identify it as coming from someone far away. The song makes separation feel like a message that can cross distance; its tear is at once an expression of sorrow and something that can arrive from another person.

That lyrical premise gives the song an emotional clarity missing from Fiete’s circumstances. The scene does not show him speaking openly about loneliness or explaining what he wants from another person. Instead, the book identifies his misery, then lets his favorite song sound beside it. The effect is not to establish that the song’s absent beloved represents any particular person. Rather, the song supplies a compact, repeatable form for longing at a moment when Fiete feels isolated and has little prospect of connection. Its melancholy is personal to him, but its words also anticipate the later scene in which another vulnerable person is present with him and yet remains profoundly alone.

Repetition in the Apartment

The song returns in Gerda’s apartment, where the surrounding objects make its emotional world seem almost impossibly distant. The rooms are crowded with mismatched furniture, dolls, stuffed animals, damaged household goods, and clothing; the kitchen floor is lined with bottles, and the carpet has absorbed years of bodily and domestic grime. In this setting, Fiete puts on Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen. His eyes are glassy with emotion because he finds the song beautiful, and he pours more drink until the bottle is empty. The song’s sadness is therefore not simply remembered or mentioned: Fiete plays it into the room, making it part of the encounter between them.

He plays it seven times. That count turns the record’s return into the scene’s governing rhythm: the same song begins again while the drinking continues and the apartment’s dirt and disorder remain unchanged. Repetition can resemble devotion, but here it does not produce a conversation or a shared declaration. Gerda sits rigidly, unable to bring herself to ask whether she may lie down. Fiete, meanwhile, is absorbed in the music and drink. The gap between the song’s imagined connection and the characters’ actual relation is stark: the record speaks of a tear sent from one person to another, while Gerda cannot safely make even a small request.

On the eighth play, Fiete stumbles and crashes into the edge of a cupboard, injuring his shoulder at a place he has hurt before. He presses and tests it, then decides that he can remain sitting a little longer. His reluctance to go to bed matters to the scene’s pacing: although the evening is nearly over, he says he sometimes feels good precisely then, when everything is otherwise finished. Gerda has fallen asleep in her chair. When Fiete shakes her awake, she is startled; he tells her they are going across. The song’s repeated emotional pause thus gives way not to mutual consolation but to Fiete directing what happens next. The subsequent action, in which he lifts her smock as he had imagined doing, makes the contrast between lyrical tenderness and imposed sexual access unmistakable.

From Longing to a Captive Routine

The song remains part of the later pattern of drinking and control. After a winter walk to the fish auction hall and back, Fiete and Gerda drink heavily in the apartment. He plays two records in alternation: Es geht ein Pferdehalfter an der Wand and Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen. The repeated return of Fiete’s favorite now accompanies the last hours in which Gerda is free to leave. That evening he takes her identity card, ostensibly for safekeeping and as security because she has no money; the next morning he locks her inside and takes the card with him. The song does not cause this confinement, but its place in the sequence makes its language of distance and arrival resonate against a concrete separation imposed by Fiete.

The objects and actions around the record sharpen that reversal. Gerda is hungry but does not dare ask for food, because she is a guest without money. The following day she tries to make the room more bearable by cleaning it. Fiete is moved by the difference when he returns, cries a little, and rewards her by taking her to Zum Goldenen Handschuh. In this progression, the song belongs to an environment where gestures that might look tender—playing music, crying, offering a drink, or taking someone out—coexist with dependence and coercion. The lyric’s imagined bond cannot make Gerda free to choose where she goes or whether she stays.

Recurrence and Significance

The song’s meaning develops through the difference between its lyrical motion and the fixed conditions of the scenes in which it is heard. In the bar, its traveling tear gives form to Fiete’s stated loneliness. In the apartment, repeated playback expresses his susceptibility to the song’s beauty, while his drinking, Gerda’s silence, and the assault expose how little reciprocal tenderness that emotion guarantees. Later, as the record alternates with another song during the drinking that precedes Gerda’s confinement, the image of something traveling toward someone absent stands beside her loss of freedom and isolation.

The book does not present the song as a cure, a promise fulfilled, or proof that Fiete’s feelings make him compassionate. Its force comes from recurrence and contrast. The same favorite song can carry genuine emotional appeal for Fiete and still sound within scenes marked by filth, intoxication, sexual violence, and captivity. Salvatore Adamo is credited as the song’s lyricist in the book’s source notes. Within the narrative, however, its most decisive function is not biographical but structural: each return briefly opens a space of lyric longing, then the surrounding action closes that space again.